On Feb. 27, 2019, Army Corps of Engineers Chief of Operations for Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Justin Murphree was on his way home from work when he got a call from his navigation manager telling him there was a problem on the waterway.
The month had seen historic flooding, and now that the water level was starting to drop again, a boat had gotten hung up on a huge sandbar that had appeared just south of the Aberdeen Lock.
“When we first saw it, we knew it was going to be bad,” Murphree told the Columbus Rotary Club during its weekly meeting Tuesday at Lion Hills Center.
With the appearance of the sandbar, the maximum depth across that part of the waterway was about three feet.
“You could walk across the channel at that time,” he said.
What had happened, he explained, was the earlier floods had carried soil and sediment along the waterway, depositing it in different parts of the channel until it built up to where barges and other commercial and recreational traffic couldn’t navigate the waterway.
It would be 30 days later before a dredge — special equipment designed to remove the sediment deposits and clear the waterway — could arrive from Mobile, Alabama, and begin to dig out the sandbar.
“A lot of the time that the waterway was shut down, we weren’t making any progress,” Murphree said. “We were just sitting there waiting on a dredge.”
It wasn’t the only such blockage along the waterway’s roughly 234 miles of channel that year, but it was one of the biggest. Usually, engineers on the waterway dredge about 400,000 cubic yards of materials a year, Murphree said. In 2019, they dredged 1.2 million yards.
Recreationally, he said, the Corps of Engineers had to clean washed-out campgrounds and damaged infrastructure affected by the flooding. But the bigger impact was on industry. The waterway itself closed to traffic for two and a half months. The closure affected local industries like Tronox, which temporarily switched to trucking to move their equipment and goods while barges were unable to traverse the waterway.
Thankfully, Murphree said, commercial traffic on the waterway has largely bounced back since the heavy floods in 2019 and the slightly less damaging floods in 2020.
“I will say in 2020 our tonnage was down,” he told The Dispatch after the Rotary meeting. “But we feel like that’s because of COVID.”
The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t hugely affected the traffic on the waterway though, he told Rotarians. Primarily, it’s affected the waterway’s employees, especially lock operators who can’t work from home and are having to wear masks and keep social distancing at work. The Corps also closed down some recreational facilities when the pandemic first began in March — mainly “because there were so many unknowns” at that time about the virus, he said. The Corps later opened those facilities back to the public.
“We understand that, especially during this time, if you can’t be outside, where can you be?” he said.
Murphree also said the Corps will be getting an emergency dredge this month for the parts of the waterway close to Columbus and Aberdeen, so if there is another build-up of debris like in 2019, engineers won’t have to wait weeks for the equipment to dig it out.
He told The Dispatch the Corps does not expect this year to see the heavy floods of the last two years.
Still, he emphasized, that’s a forecast, and they can’t say for sure.
“We’re hoping for a good spring this year and not a lot of rain,” he told Rotary. “We’ll see.”
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